He stood up as I came in but did not put out his hand—probably didn’t want to lose his place. He said, “What do you want, Mr. Spenser?”
“As you may know, Rachel Wallace was kidnaped yesterday.”
“I heard that on the news,” he said. We still stood.
“I’m looking for her.”
“Yes?”
“Can you help?”
“How on earth could I help?” English said. “What have I to do with her?”
“You picketed her speech at the library. You called her a bulldyke. As I recall, you said you’d ‘never let her win’ or something quite close to that.”
“I deny saying any such thing,” English said. “I exercised my Constitutional right of free speech by picketing. I made no threats whatsoever. You assaulted me.”
So he hadn’t forgotten.
“We don’t have to be mad at each other, Mr. English. We can do this easy.”
“I wish to do nothing with you. It is preposterous that you’d think I knew anything about a crime.”
“On the other hand,” I said, “we can do it the other way. We can talk this all over with the Boston cops. There’s a sergeant named Belson there who’ll be able to choke back the terror he feels when you mention your friend, the chief. He’d feel duty bound to drag your tail over to Berkeley Street and ask you about the reports that you’d threatened Rachel Wallace before witnesses. If you annoyed him, he might even feel it necessary to hold you overnight in the tank with the winos and fags and riffraff.”
“My attorney—” English said.
“Oh yeah,” I said, “Belson just panics when an attorney shows up. Sometimes he gets so nervous, he forgets where he put the client. And the attorney has to chase all over the metropolitan area with his writ, looking into assorted pens and tanks and getting puke on his Chesterfield overcoat to see if he can find his client.”
English opened his mouth and closed it and didn’t say anything.
I went and sat in his red-and-gold wing chair. “How’d you know Rachel Wallace was going to be at the library?” I said.
“It was advertised in the local paper,” he said.
“Who organized the protest?”
“Well, the committee had a meeting.”
“What committee?”
“The vigilance committee.”
“I bet I know your motto,” I said.
“Eternal vigilance—” he said.
“I know,” I said. “I know. Who is the head of the committee?”
“I am chairman.”
“Gee, and still so humble,” I said.
“Spenser, I do not find you funny,” he said.
“Puts you in excellent company,” I said. “Could you account for your movements since Monday night at nine o’clock if someone asked you?”
“Of course I could. I resent being asked.”
“Go ahead,” I said.
“Go ahead what?”
“Go ahead and account for your movements since nine o’clock Monday night.”
“I certainly will not. I have no obligation to tell you anything.”
“We already did this once, Lawrence. Tell me, tell Belson—I don’t care.”
“I have absolutely nothing to hide.”
“Funny how I knew you’d say that. Too bad to waste it on me though. It’ll dazzle the cops.”
“Well, I don’t,” he said. “I don’t have anything to hide. I was at a committee meeting from seven thirty Monday night until eleven fifteen. Then I came straight home to bed.”
“Anybody see you come home?”
“My mother, several of the servants.”
“And the next day?”
“I was at Old Colony Trust at nine fifteen, I left there at eleven, played racquetball at the club, then lunched at the club. I returned home after lunch, arrived here at three fifteen. I read until dinner. After dinner—”
“Okay, enough. I’ll check on all of this, of course. Who’d you play racquetball with?”
“I simply will not involve my friends in this. I will not have you badgering and insulting them.”
I let that go. He’d fight that one. He didn’t want his friends at the club to know he was being investigated, and a guy like English will dig in to protect his reputation. Besides I could check it easily. The club and the committee, too.
“Badger?” I said. “Insult? Lawrence, how unkind. I am clearly not of your social class, but I am not without grace.”
“Are you through?”
“I am for now,” I said. “I will authenticate your—if you’ll pardon the expression—alibi, and I may look further into your affairs. If the alibi checks, I’ll still keep you in mind, however. You didn’t have to do it, to have it done, or to know who did it.”
“I shall sue you if you continue to bother me,” English said.
“And if you are involved in any way in anything that happened to Rachel Wallace,” I said, “I will come back and put you in the hospital.”
English narrowed his eyes a little. “Are you threatening me?” he said.
“That’s exactly it, Lawrence,” I said. “That is exactly what I am doing. I am threatening you.”
English looked at me with his eyes narrowed for a minute, and then he said, “You’d better leave.”
“Okay by me,” I said, “but remember what I told you. If you are holding out on me, I’ll find out, and I’ll come back. If you know something and don’t tell me, I will find out, and I will hurt you.”
He stood and opened the study door.
“A man in my position has resources, Spenser.” He was still squinting at me. I realized that was his tough look.
“Not enough,” I said, and walked off down the hall and out the front door. The snow had stopped. Around back, a Plymouth sedan was parked next to my car. When I walked over to it, the window rolled down and Belson looked out at me.
“Thought this was your heap,” he said. “Learn anything?”
I laughed. “I just got through threatening English with you,” I said, “so he’d talk to me. Now here you are, and he could just as well not have talked to me.”
“Get in,” Belson said. “We’ll compare notes.”
I got in the back seat. Belson was in the passenger seat. A cop I didn’t know sat behind the wheel. Belson didn’t introduce us.
“How’d you get here?” I said.
“You told Quirk about the library scene,” Belson said, “and we questioned Linda Smith along with everybody else and she mentioned it to me. I had it on my list when Quirk mentioned it to me. So we called the Belmont Police and found ourselves about an hour behind you. What you get?”
“Not much,” I said. “If it checks out, he’s got an alibi for all the time that he needs.”
“Run it past us,” Belson said. “We won’t mention you, and we’ll see if the story stays the same.”
I told Belson what English had told me. The cop I didn’t know was writing a few things in a notebook. When I was through, I got out of the Plymouth and into my own car. Through the open window I said to Belson, “Anything surfaces, I’d appreciate hearing.”
“Likewise,” Belson said.
I rolled up the window and backed out and turned down the drive. As I pulled onto the street I saw Belson and the other cop get out and start toward the front door. The small drift of snow that had blocked the driveway when I’d arrived was gone. Man in English’s position was not without resources.
19
The main entrance to the Boston Public Library used to face Copley Square across Dartmouth Street. There was a broad exterior stairway and inside there was a beautiful marble staircase leading up to the main reading room with carved lions and high-domed ceilings. It was always a pleasure to go there. It felt like a library and looked like a library, and even when I was going in there to look up Duke Snider’s lifetime batting average, I used to feel like a scholar.